It’s always a good idea to check out what’s being advertised to see what the financial product firms are pushing. Some of this is horse-leading-the-cart stuff, but sometimes financial products are developed based on demand for such things. Looking at advertising in the financial industry is a momentum-driven way to look at trends — today’s, tomorrow’s, and unfortunately for most investors, yesterday’s…
This post was compiled by going to various financial sites and seeing who and what was being advertised.
So, here is what’s hot right now in financial product and advertising land:
Commodity funds:
U.S. Global Investors: The fund family runs the Global Resources Fund (PSPFX) which invests in companies that are involved in “exploration, production and processing of petroleum, natural gas, coal, alternative energies, chemicals, mining, iron and steel, and paper and forest products, and can invest in any part of the world.”
UBS: UBS is marketing its new fund of 25 MLPs, the UBS E-TRACS Alerian MLP Infrastructure Fund (MLPI), designed to
“give investors exposure to the infrastructure component of the Master Limited Partnership asset class – its constituents each earn at least 50% of their EBITDA from assets that are not directly exposed to changes in commodity prices.”
Online Brokers
While I didn’t see a single ad for the wireline brokers online, on almost every investment site I browsed, I saw an ad for one of the leading online brokers (TD Ameritrade and its subsidiary ThinkorSwim, Schwab, and E*Trade).
The e-brokers are advertising products and services in direct competition with the bulge bracket brokers. Some use options and mutual fund selection to lure new customers in (see below).
Schwab: Schwab is focusing its efforts advertising on sites like Seeking Alpha with a message of using options and advanced charting to lure more savvy investors.
ThinkorSwim: TD Ameritrade’s recent purchase is turning out to be a gem for the firm and seems to be the focus of the online broker’s messaging. The top ranked broker by Barron’s two-years running (.pdf) is marketing its bundle of an offer to rebate active traders (4o trades/mo.) about $40 towards high-speed internet access.
TD Ameritrade: The ebroker’s messaging seems to be a consistent message of service and products on par with those investors are used to at full-service
brokers. Things like mutual fund selection, research, planning, and service are all important levers the firm is playing on to attract investors leaving their brokers.
Reuters Insider
I discussed the launch of Reuters video product, Insider, recently in a post. 
Reuters is keeping the pressure on Bloomberg’s investing terminal business by creating a platform for video publishers to reach institutional investors. There is a lot riding on this initiative for the content giant and it will be interesting to see how well the launch and subsequent roll-out go.
FX services
Saxo Bank: Lots of stuff going on online with Saxo’s forex services. I found 
this ad (see left) on Bloomberg.com for Saxo’s mentoring program. Other ads focus on pricing on trading packages. Saxo Bank is pushing really hard for this business. From the amount of forex advertising online and an upcoming IPO planned for Forex.com, the brokerages are going gangbusters after new business.
dbFX: Deutsche Bank’s currency trading platform is very active all over 
Bloomberg, as well. DB’s is the self-acclaimed world’s largest liquidity provider and is targeting both individual investors as well as institutional business. Most of their activity online centers around the free trial platform with $50k in virtual currency. That means, it should take approx. 6 minutes before someone *virtually* blows themselves out…:-)
International exposure
Emerging Global Shares: Spreading some wealth on Seeking Alpha, EG Shares is marketing various ways to access infrastructure investments around the world in China (CHXX), Brazil (BRXX) and India (INXX). This plays into last year’s message of everything emerging market and everything anti-dollar. How’s that working out right now?
Market Vectors Latin American: Van Eck’s ETF division is marketing its Latin 
American Small-Cap Index ETF (LATM) as a way to tap into small-cap growth in what’s going on south of the equator. A soccer (I think they call it football) theme pervades the marketing of this fund. Hope someone from LatAm does really well in the upcoming World Cup.
Levered ETFs
We’ve seen more and more ways to insert leverage into investing, from general indices to plays on commodities.
Proshares: The ETF firm has been very aggressive with their introduction of 3x and -3x ETFs that track the Dow 30, S&P MidCap 400, Russell 2000, S&P 500 and the Nasdaq QQQQs.
Volatility
iShares: Blackrock‘s iShares‘ iPath ETN(whew, mouthful) is marketing a product to 
play the recent increase in volatility in the market. It trades like an ETF (it’s actually an ETN, a note backed by Blackrock) and comes in 2 different flavors: the VXX (S&P 500 VIX short-term) and VXZ (S&P 500 VIX mid-term).
CFA
Especially on Barrons.com, the CFA Institute (Charted Financial Analyst) is hawking its services and upcoming 
accreditation programs. I haven’t seen recent numbers but my gut tells me that while the job market stays soft, the institute is seeing more and more financial professionals or those aspiring to be taking their onerous 3 level exams.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek
Bloomberg is getting more aggressive about marketing BusinessWeek after
its recent purchase of the ailing weekly biz rag. I think the addition of the consumer voice is great for the Bloomberg empire and it appears the firm will take good share of this market offline and online with BusinessWeek’s new site (in preview here).
Brazilian timber
What post on the scape of financial product advertising would be complete without the requisite mention of ads for Brazilian timber. Plastering the pages of Google Finance are promises of nice-size returns in global timber supplies. There’s not a lot of info on this particular investment but whomever is running it is trying to capture emails, phone numbers, etc. of interesting investors. Lead generation is such an interesting thing to watch.
Miami Real Estate
On various investment sites were ads for Zeder, a broker of high-end (multi million dollar) South Florida homes. Interesting here that a local broker is advertising so heavily. I think it probably has to do with South Florida real estate market getting hit particularly hard, making it an interesting destination for investors or wannabe investors in U.S. real estate.
If I could have my pick of the litter, I’d pick up this little doozy of a home in historic Coconut Grove. If anyone has a spare $12M burning a hole in his pocket, let me know.
Re-emergence of Lehman/Barclays
Advertising on a whole slew of financial and business sites (including 
BusinessWeek) is the ‘new’ Barclays. Couple of things interesting about Barclays ad spend: the fact that they massively pushing its investment banking services in this environment and its push into the U.S. Fresh off of scooping up some of the Lehman Bros pieces, Barclays is positioning itself to rapidly gain share in the U.S.
Summary
So, interesting traipse through online financial advertising to see what’s hot. While international and commodity funds, online brokers, and opportunistic investments appear to be all the rage, I find it worthy to note that very few mutual fund companies or traditional stock brokerages were paying for Internet ads. Either they’ve conceded Internet users to their online competitors or they just find that online financial ads don’t perform as well as offline – I don’t know.
What financial products/services are you seeing online?
